Alex Casey meets the Wellington man behind ‘Cokey’ the Cocaine Bear.
Over the course of one week in 2021, Allan Henry made four separate visits to observe Sasa the Sun Bear at Wellington Zoo. “You can just see that they have this incredible level of ease,” he reflects. “A bear is just completely present. There’s a subtle way that they move and notice things.” As much as Sasa provided some useful insights for Henry’s next project, there was one key area where she was letting him down. “Obviously, the Sun Bear wasn’t rampaging and murdering things,” he laughs.
Henry (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Ruanui) is the man behind the titular Cocaine Bear, the viral horror comedy film of the moment about a bear that, well, does a lot of cocaine. Inspired by the true saga that saw an American black bear ingest 34 kilograms of cocaine dumped by drug smugglers, Cocaine Bear deviates away from the sad truth (the bear promptly died and was stuffed for display in a Kentucky mall) to tell a much better story (the bear goes on a killing spree and everyone from Felicity from Felicity to Tyler from Modern Family are in the firing line).
Henry has more than a decade of experience in motion capture performance, having embodied everything from King Kong in Godzilla vs Kong to Steppenwolf in Justice League. He says he’s loved being “physically creative” ever since he was a child – an upbringing full of gymnastics and martial arts lead to a discovery of performing arts at high school, and then on to studying stage combat and stunt work at drama school. Wētā came calling with a motion capture job on Tintin in 2010, and Henry has been slithering in and out of fuzzy grey morphsuits ever since.
“It’s funny, we call the suits ‘the great equalisers’ because literally nobody looks good in them,” he laughs. “Everyone gets really self-conscious because it’s so tight and everything is so exposed, but the reality is this: no one is looking at you objectively, they are looking at you as a piece of data.” Where some might tremble at the idea of wearing a skin-tight suit at work, Henry says it’s allowed him to play countless roles he would have never otherwise been able.
“The joy of this kind of work is that it doesn’t actually matter what you look like, as long as you can move in the way that the director wants you to move.”
In the case of Cocaine Bear, which Henry was shoulder-tapped for after director Elizabeth Banks asked Wētā for a recommendation, the role had some unique demands. “Cokey [the on-set name for the bear] was different from a lot of the other roles I’ve played that have been much more humanised,” says Henry. “Cokey is straight up a bear, so the movement that’s required is very animalistic.” After nabbing the role, he got to work watching nature documentaries and YouTube videos – “ bears crossing the street, tearing up cars, stuff like that.”
After two weeks of research in Aotearoa, nearly half of which spent staring at Sasa the sun bear, Henry flew to Dublin where he had to quarantine for two weeks. “I was stuck in this apartment with nothing to do so everyday I would wake up, do a workout, and then traipse around like a bear,” he says. “Anyone who glanced in a window must have thought I was absolutely insane.” Then was time for on set rehearsals, where he worked with Banks to add the cocaine-fuelled elements to the performance (“a twitch here and a twitch there”).
On set, Henry says he wore a “ridiculous” outfit to become Cokey. “I’m in tight black spandex, matte black sneakers and a balaclava and gloves,” he laughs. Less conspicuous were the long metal extensions attached to his forearms, allowing him to take the same shape as a bear when running on all fours. A helmet with a large silicone bear snout topped off the look, along with two pingpong balls so the actors knew where Cokey’s strung-out eyes would be. “At first everyone’s like, ‘this guy looks ridiculous’. But after about 10 minutes, everyone’s like, ‘well, back to work’.”
One of Henry’s favourite sequences to film involved Cokey mauling a group of people in a ranger’s office, and then turning on the poor ambulance officers who try to save them. “There was just so much fake blood,” he laughs. Combining practical effects with moments of absurdity and comedy, Henry says it was easy to identify another New Zealand influence in Cocaine Bear. “Even when I first read the screenplay, I thought it felt so much like early Peter Jackson,” he says. “Fake limbs getting torn off, crazy bear wounds, it was all really fun.”
Having only watched the completed film the day before our interview (fittingly, at the Peter Jackson-owned Roxy cinema), Henry hopes Cocaine Bear proves, just like the success of locally-made M3GAN, that there is still room for horror films with a difference. “You know, this is not a big blockbuster Marvel movie, but it’s also not a bleak story about humanity either. It’s just this weird combo of 80s nostalgia, comedy, horror and nonsense.” And with there already being talk of a New Zealand-inspired sequel, there might even be more nonsense to come.
So would he be up for a sequel, even if it meant playing a cocaine-fiend shark tying one on in the Pacific Ocean? “Oh yeah definitely,” laughs Henry. “Definitely.”